With the continued popularity of the Dungeon Finder, many players have been asking for a way to group up with real-life friends who play on other realms to take on instances together. Today, we wanted to give you a heads up about a new feature currently in development that will allow players to invite Real ID friends of the same faction to a party regardless of the realm they play on, and then queue up for a 5-player regular or Heroic dungeon.

As this is a fairly complex service to develop, we don’t have a release date to share quite yet. It’s important to note that as with some of the other convenience- and connectivity-oriented features we offer, certain elements of the cross-realm Real ID party system will be premium-based, though only the player sending the invitations will need to have access to the premium service. We'll have more details to share with you as development progresses -- in the meantime, you may begin to see elements of the feature appear on the World of Warcraft PTR.

- We are preparing to launch a new way to playing our game to our players in the next patch. Patch 4.4 will introduce 3 new 5 player dungeons and daily quest hubs in Twilight Highlands. Not only are we giving you new content, we are introducing a new system on how our players interact with the content. Patch 4.4 will introduce the Premium account! For a small fee players will unlock a premium account which will allow them to do even more things in the Warcraft world.

+ New haircuts, new skin colors, new facial features and the introduction of tattoos!
+ Players will also have access to the dance studio to create new dances for their characters!
+ With the new 4.4 5 man dungeons were are introducing "Premium" mode... which will be just a bit harder than Heroic mode and will reward the players with "Premium Points" which they can turn in to the "Premium Vendor" to buy the current level of epics from raid content! Any item from any boss will be on the "Premium Vendor" including Legendary items. Earlier 5 man dungeons will be folded into the Premium system in later patches.
+ Premium mounts and pets.
+ Cross-Realm Dungeon feature will also finally release!
+ Premiun players will also be able to access the LFR system. LFR system is much like LFD except it will allow players to randomally queue for 10/25 player raids.

The problem I'm hearing in this thread is that it's going to be hard to convince your parents to pony up so you can play w/ off-server friends.

"Buuuut, maaaaaaaaa'aaaaaaaam!"

Seriously. I'll bet Blizz would be happy to trade you inflation on their monthly fee for everything 'Premium' they will ever sell. Think about how much more expensive energy and everything else is than it was 7 years ago. Think about how many CS people they had to hire just to help the millions of unwashed compewter newbs that can't keep key loggers off their systems.

Sure, I would really love it if they had a clear demarcation between a team that we paid our $15 a month to for further development, and the team that designs bonus 'Premium' content, but that's just not how game dev works.

I'm willing to bet that the pricing they announce isn't even going to turn a profit- it's likely going to be just enough to break even, so that they wouldn't be diverting resources.

Not making apologies here, but seriously...

Do you get pissed at Wendy's when the guy behind you gets bacon and cheese?

I wouldn't be surprised if they attached this to the Mobile AH/Guild Chat feature directly. Rename the service World of Warcraft Premium instead of World of Warcraft Remote. Include the AH/Guild Chat, Cross-Server Party Creation, etc. as part of this service.

There are people saying they "spend tons of money" on World of Warcraft already. What?
How is World of Warcraft tons of money? It's $14.99 a month at worst. That's less than the cost of going to see a movie at a theater when you count a small popcorn and drink. Less than the cost of eating out one time. The value is fricking insane as it is for the amount of hours of entertainment you get out of that single $14.99 per month. I am not surprised they are offering a premium service for features that aren't inside the general scope of the game. It's not like they are selling "Premium Raid Content." That would be insane, but they would never do that.

Haha, it's getting ridiculous. I hope their "Pay 2 play and pay for a lot of additional stuff" leads to a massive loss of subscriptions; it is the only thing worse than the usual F2P microtransaction model.

It is an option you do not have now. It was never promised as something you could get for your regular subscription. If you want to use premium services such as Remote Guild Chat, RealId Cross Realm Dungeon Groups, or other such features that are outside the normal game play why should they not be allowed to charge for it?

Last time I checked the cross realm dungeon finder only works with realms in your battlegroup. Battlegroups are limited to one data center so they don't have to worry too much about how the data gets from data center to data center and if they need to do any encryption or special handling of the data.

This is extending it to all players not matter what battlegroup they are in. Spanning data centers. May seem like a minor point to you but even so this does add another layer of complexity.

I could have swore battlegroups were done away with (as far as match making restrictions) around 4.0.3 and BGs and RDF just pulled from anyone within your region.

Was reading this with a smile on my face "yes FINALLY i can play with my friends on different serves without paying! ( even though most have quit by now because of it)"..............."This will be a premium service..." GG blizz you fooled me again!...*mumbles* money...stupid...cold...theivin...astards..* Still buys subscription for the "fix"

Why is that? We've been doing that shit for free for like the past year and a half.

Oh you've been queuing with your friends via RealID for the past year and a half?! REALLY?! It's a bit different to throw a 1000 of fish into a pool and pull any 5 out that match certain qualifications, than it is to pull 2 specific fish out of said pool. If you really need an analogy to understand. Regardless, Blizzard never had to implement DF at all.

LAME! First they wanna charge us to change our characters looks/name...Then they wanna charge us for changing realms...Then pets and mounts...NOW THEY WANT TO CHARGE US TO RUN DUNGEONS WITH FRIENDS?! Fucking lame, honestly.

If they're going to start implementing all of these "premium" services - why not just up sub prices by like $2/month or something?

This feels like it's slowly going in the direction of "WoW is going to be F2P soon, but if you want to chat/use the AH/buy from vendors/run dungeons we'll charge you $.99 per instance of each! "Enjoy" your gaming!"